Oh. Well the person in the police car (filming it) was at the scene of a crash when a car hit his police cruiser and turned it around 90 degrees. The rain made the Fed Ex truck jackknife and hit the red car and the police car. The cop was not in the car either time of the crash

I doubt it would "protect the original paint". Paint on cars aren't super durable, and duct tape, especially when on for a prolonged period of time along with the moisture of rain, snow, and other natural occurrences, added with the constant re-heating with the sun, would cause the tape to peel away the original paint. Even bumper stickers can do that.

xD I used to have an awesome car I stuck a ton of really stupid stickers on. When I tried to re-sell it I ended up destroying the original paint. I tried to repaint it with spray paint but it never looked like the original. T_T

Awww I'm sorry to hear. Yeah, can be hard to match the color and car paint has like this really cool shine to it. Even black cars shine in a way. Anyways pretty creative to try spray painting it. Most people just ends up paying tons for a respray, and when you're selling it, that doesn't have to be the economical best option.

Unless that guy actually wanted to cover his car in duct tape (for whatever reason), I'm assuming the most of the original paint on the car was too rusty or peeling off, and he didn't want to pay to re-paint it, so...duct tape.